If buildings are meant to be for everybody, then everybody is surely entitled to have an opinion on them and any aspect of them – goes one line of reasoning. However, trying to identify buildings that have a degree of public recognition independent of their degree of architectural recognition is like trying to detect neutrinos in that all influencing factors first have to be negated and that’s next to impossible. Given my history, I’m an imperfect documenter, or even identifier of buildings that endear themselves to a general public and not necessarily to architects. Nevertheless, I’ll call them meme buildings because it best describes the ripples these buildings cause.
Face House1, 1974 Kazumasa Yamashita
On a recent trip to Japan, a student showed me the December–January issue of Architectural Review that had Kazumasa Yamashita’s 1974 Face House on the cover. I wasn’t shocked at that as much as I was at seeing a current architecture magazine being passed around a university architecture studio. Japanese universities and/or their students may or may not be different but there’s definitely a different and functioning architectural media ecosystem even if the issue I saw forsook editorial for many full-page images. If that same studio subscribes to AR, then it probably also has a group subscription to https://data.shinkenchiku.online/en – the online archive of Japan Architect – with “photos, drawings, explanatory texts, and data sheets for over 23,500 architectural projects published in both back and current issues of Japan Architect, Housing Special Issue and a&u.” Or, even if it didn’t, a single-student, yearly subscription costs JP¥3,680 (US$23.36, STG£17.49) which is less than a single issue of AR even without ithe postage.
I’m mildly curious about what “new things to say” were said and about what adaptive re-use in suburban Beijing looks like. In passing though, I suspect the term “adaptive re-use” already sounds as dated as “sustainability” because potentially useful terms have to make way for all those new things to say. The unfortunate thing is that, whatever the format, we’re endlessly distracted by the new and incapable of engaging with anything for any length of time , let alone improve it.
Face House has a popularity that goes beyond architecture magazines and their readers but, as your imperfect documenter, I can’t tell how far. Face House is more than half a century old now and this is extraordinary for a residential buildling in Tokyo. Its owner still lives there and never felt a need to redeveop. Face House is easy enough to find if you’re in Koromonodara-dori, Tatedaionjicho, Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto. Anthropomorphism and buildings is a subject not often discussed yet, any time you see a pair of circular windows, you’re going to think of eyes and a sentience inside looking out. The opposite, looking into eyes still holds true but even only metaphorically is sufficient. We don’t overthink apparent noses and mouths. We don’t see people visiting the entry-level spaces as entering and leaving from the building’s mouth. We don’t worry about the Face House “nose” being open at the top and providing indirect light to a bedroom. Or the “nostrils” being open top and bottom. It doesn’t matter as the improbable nose and mouth direct our attention and our emotions to the eyes and make us feel we know this building. Or at least its facade. Nobody cares about the internal layout or how this building is used.
I should’ve titled this post Random Musings on the Theme of Meme Buildings. If nothing else, I hope to find out what a meme building isn’t. They’re not well-known buildings or those buildings some people like to call iconic, and they’re definitely not must-see buildings for the architectural tourist. They’re not historically significant although a building can be a meme building despite being part of that thing known or taught as the history of architecture. These are easy to identify because, although we’re told they’re historically significant, fewer people remember and fewer still care why. Meme buildings are spared this fate because they’re just known for what they are. They’re part of a shared public remembrance rather than a history. They may be evocative of a time and place but it makes no more sense to visit the place than it does the time as they exist outside of both. I’m not sure if The Big Duck is a good example because – I keep saying – I’m an imperfect documenter. Did this building really endear itself to the general public? It’s all history now, but could the entire history of post-modernism be based on a statistically unverifiable academic assertion? Can the moniker “popular” really be conflated with the number of people pulling over to purchase duck-related produce in some corner of Long Island back in the day? I’ll save my doubts for some other post.
The Big Duck, 1931 Martin Maurer2 3 4
Thie image above is the oldest I could find. Guessing the age from the car in the distance (above) and the New York Times newspaper cutting (below, left) from 1931, it looks like it’s the same car and the same year it opened, viz. a photoshoot. Four decades later, the architectural fraternity was to care little about who designed it and had it built, and only tangentially about why. The building’s been moved a few times and no longer sells duck-related produce but none of this matters.
It’s been claimed The Big Duck was the precursor to Googie5 architecture that, driven by commercial intent, existed to make people look at it. Directly related further down the line are post-modernism and pretty-much everything that happened after. I’ll choose the 1959-1961 LAX Theme Building to represent Googie and the Sydney Opera House to represent the rest. If it appears on a tea-towel, it’s probably a souvenir and not a meme. You can buy Sydney Opera House salt and pepper shakers but I can’t bring myself to post an image(6).
Shōji Hayashi’s 1962 San’ai Dream Center was certainly cherished but, given the approaching 1964 Tokyo Olympics, was burdened with a very public and, for a time, national symbolism.7 Its demolition was announced in 2023 but I searched press releases on the Ricoh website8 and couldn’t find any announcement of what’s to replace it. I drew a blank on the usual architectural aggregators so it seems like the architects have yet to release images. I can’t help thinking there’s some rigorous focus-group testing of design proposals going on because you can’t just take away a center for people’s dreams and replace it with anything less. Tough job. The best possible outcome would be for Nikken Sekkei to rebuild San’ai Dream Center with whatever improvements and sophistications current technology makes possible – in much the same way as Bohlin, Cywinski Jackson did with the 2016 rebuild of their 2006 Fifth Avenue Apple Store.
Buildings built for international expositions are often expected to have popular appeal because they have a national symbolism designed into them but this doesn’t necessarily endear them to the public. Regardless of what Australians thought about it, the Australian Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka endeared itself to Japanese people who saw in its silhouette Hokusai’s beloved The Great Wave off Kanagawa – or at least they did in the run-up to and duration of the expo. Once the expo was over, the pavilion was gifted to the Japanese city of Yokkaich, became a museum and probably continued to endear itself to a greatly diminished number of Japanese people. I expect the building was eventually demolished in 2014 because, after a grace period, its unusual structure couldn’t be retrofitted to comply with the 2000 revisions to Japan’s seismic design regulations. The building is not even a memory now.
Futuro House9 circa 1970 Matti Suuronen
Less than 100 Futuro Houses were ever built but they spread around the world. Of the sixty-three that have been located, some are derelict and some have been lovingly restored. I remember seeing a 1970s newspaper photograph of one being used as the marketing office for some new Perth suburban subdivision. Bull Creek? No – Burrendah. I’ve never been inside a Futuro House but I’m always amused by the photograph of humans dancing around the fire in this house of the future.
“With so few in the world, it’s somewhat remarkable that two have managed to find their way to Perth: the first has been here since the late ’60s, and was initially used as a residential sales office at the new Burrendah subdivision. Later, it was positioned on the corner of Leach Highway and Karel Avenue, where it became a recognisable landmark until its removal in 1996.”10
Endearment is the only characteristic I can identify that distinguishes a meme building from every other type of building. Hong Kong has many Instagrammable scenes but few people would find Choi Hung Estate9 or Chungking Mansions or Montane Mansions endearing although their residents probably have a special affection for them as the place where they live.
I’d initially thought Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower was a meme building but it’s more like the Hong Kong estates that are well known by architects and architecture students but not endearing to people other than those who live there. For architects and architecture students, Nakagin Capsule Tower exists as a built representation of a building that could be reconfigured to change over time but, in the end, only proved that a representation of something wasn’t as good as the real thing. The building did change over time but not in a good way. It was sad seeing it in 2015 with makeshift drainpipes and covered in pigeon netting but, for all that, the building was loved and at least partially tenanted until the very end. Books document its tenants and the interiors of those capsules and many photographs of personalized interiors have appeared in architecture and interior magazines over the years. Drawings exist as architectural souvenirs and rememberances.
I’m now only slightly clearer on what meme buildings aren’t. I found three possible contenders of The Big Duck, The Face House, and The Futuro House and the only conclusion I can draw from that is that a building needs to survive for long enough for it to enter people’s consciousness if it is to endear itself. Endearment may not even be the right word but it’ll have to do for now. It exists outside of architectural discourse and is probably the reason it’s shunned in favour of qualities more directly manipulable. This endearment, affection or whatever it is may be spontaneous and fleeting but the buildings that evoke it may well be the only true public architecture
This post was mostly written before last week’s Letting Go post that I felt was more urgent. My final word on Nakagin is that a configuration that had less to prove, and had fewer constraints on its geometry, structure and, crucially, its construction, would have provided far more capsules and probably for longer. When the building was demolished, cracks were found in the concrete encasing some of the steel supports on which the capsules rested. If a support were to fail, then the shear resistance of those famously high-tension bolts would suddenly – and I mean suddenly – become important. Whatever one thinks of the building that’s to replace Nakagin, we should thank it for ensuring that catastrophic failure is not part of the Nakagin memory. Because of where Nakagin’s capsule bolts and supports were located, it was never going to be possible to periodically inspect them or replace them every 25 years. The building is famous for its capsules being replaceable in theory but, in practice, whether or not they can be is irrelevant if their support fixings can’t be. It’s hard to believe nobody realized this at the time. Not that it would’ve made any difference. We wanted to believe. We must have had a manifesto vacuum at the time.
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